The present application relates to autonomous vehicles, and in particular, to systems and methods for rapidly decelerating an autonomous vehicle.
The field of fully-autonomous and/or semi-autonomous robots is a growing field of innovation. Robots are being used for many purposes including warehouse inventory operations, household vacuuming robots, hospital delivery robots, sanitation robots, and military or defense applications.
In the consumer space, handling and delivery of items by autonomous vehicles could improve society in many ways. For example, rather than spending time driving to a store, a person can instead engage in productive work while waiting for an autonomous vehicle to deliver the items. With fewer vehicles on the road, traffic conditions would also improve. For example, instead of several people driving to stores in several vehicles, a single autonomous vehicle could deliver items to those people and return items to the stores, and thereby reduce the number of vehicles on the road.
In some instances, a pedestrian or other object may enter an immediate path of an autonomous vehicle moving at high speeds (e.g., above about 30 mph). In such instances, it would be advantageous for the vehicle to be capable of stopping or otherwise avoiding the object. Since autonomous vehicles are unmanned, avoidance of the pedestrian or other object may be accomplished without care for the well-being of the vehicle or occupants.